When it comes to movement, I try to make my days as inefficient as possible. I know that sounds crazy—especially since my book is all about getting more out of doing less—but hear me out. By doing things less efficiently (walking to the coffee shop instead of brewing a cup at home, pacing inside while talking on the phone, choosing the stairs) I’m able to build more organic movement into my day and reach at least 10,000 steps.

I do this despite getting regular “exercise.” Why? Because my health depends on it and so does yours: In 2016 the American Heart Association published a research-based advisory warning that even vigorous exercise doesn’t seem to erase the damage that multiple hours of sitting does—namely increasing your risk of heart disease and diabetes.

There’s also evidence that how active you are over the course of a day can impact your weight. On average obese people sit for two and a half hours more each day than lean people and lean people stand and walk an average of more than two additional hours a day than obese people, according to research by James A. Levine, MD, PhD, a professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, Arizona.

That’s why I challenge myself, my clients, and now all of you to get at least 10,000 steps a day. That number may seem arbitrary, but 10,000 steps roughly equates to 5 miles, which (when it includes 30 minutes at a moderate intensity) satisfies CDC guidelines of at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week.

It may also feel high. If you’re like the average American, you’re currently only walking about half as much. But that’s ok. It just means you’re going to have to consciously build more movement into your day.

How to Sneak More Steps Into Your Day

The key is to make your step count a byproduct of your lifestyle rather than a goal outside of your day-to-day activity. Here are some of my recommendations for making small changes that add up to major mileage.

1. Nix the at-home coffee machine and walk to get your morning coffee instead.
2. If you drive into work, park your car a little further away from the entrance. If you take public transportation, get off the bus or subway one stop earlier and walk the extra block.
3. Go on a post-lunch walk, even if it’s just around the block. Not only will those extra 400 to 500 steps add a hefty amount towards your daily goal, they’ll also help you catch some vitamin D, which has been shown to increase serotonin, stave off seasonal affective disorder, and even help lower blood pressure.
4. If you have access to a treadmill or health club, watch your favorite show or sporting event as you walk. Even if you end up going at a slower speed, put the importance of achieving a maintainable pace at the forefront.
5. Don’t use weekends as an excuse to laze around. Work to consciously incorporate more steps into your day without having to completely deviate from your plans. Meeting friends for lunch?  Rather than driving, walk to your meet-up spot.

Keep the Momentum Going

Keep in mind, taking 10,000 steps  is the least you should do. To avoid getting complacent, I recommend gradually increasing your daily step goal by about 500 steps every other week until you’re achieving around 14,000 steps a day. Here’s how to change your step goal in the app.

Opting into Reminders to Move can also help. When turning on this function you can customize which hours of the day you want to aim to get 250 steps—or roughly two to three minutes of walking, which has been shown to help offset the negative effects of sitting. Your device will buzz 10 minutes before the hour if you have yet to hit your goal.

Absolutely no time to move? Try one of these 13 ways to sneak fitness into your day. Or pick up my book, 5 Pounds: The Breakthrough 5-Day Plan to Jump-Start Rapid Weight Loss (And Never Gain it Back!, for more ideas.

Next, discover Three Ways Sleep Deprivation Makes You Fat—Plus 5 Ways to Get More Shuteye.  It’s the fourth part of the My 5 Plan.

The post The Power of Taking 10,000 Steps (Or More!) And How to Get There appeared first on Fitbit Blog.

Marco Arment has released a public beta of Forecast, a Mac app for podcast producers. Among a slew of other great features, Forecast is hands-down the best MP3 chapter editor I’ve seen. If you’ve noticed the chapter support in The Talk Show that started earlier this year, that’s thanks to Forecast. Forecast is free of charge, too.

See also: Jason Snell’s review of Forecast at Six Colors:

There’s also a perceptual trick that Forecast uses to make encoding seem quick: When you add a file to be encoded, encoding begins immediately in the background. By the time you edit your file’s metadata, the encode may have already completed in the background. The first time I used Forecast, I thought something had gone wrong — because when I typed Command-S to save the file, it just saved. There was no wait. The file had already encoded — it was waiting for me, the slow human, to finish typing in episode titles and show descriptions.

Julian Lepinski has a thoughtful response to last week's story by Walt Mossberg on Siri's failures and inconsistencies. In particular, about the way Siri handles failed queries:

Apple’s high-level goal here should be to include responses that increase your faith in Siri’s ability to parse and respond to your question, even when that isn’t immediately possible. Google Search accomplishes this by explaining what they’re showing you, and asking you questions like “_Did you mean ‘when is the debate’?_” when they think you’ve made an error. Beyond increasing your trust in Siri, including questions like this in the responses would also generate a torrent of incredible data to help Apple tune the responses that Siri gives.

Apple has a bias towards failing silently when errors occur, which can be effective when the error rate is low. With Siri, however, this error rate is still quite high and the approach is far less appropriate. When Siri fails, there’s no path to success short of restarting and trying again (the brute force approach).

The comparison between conversational assistants and iOS' original user interface feels particularly apt. It'd be helpful to know what else to try when Siri doesn't understand a question.

→ Source: medium.com

Minecraft and VR - a pairing longed for by many. It already exists in a few mediums, but today's announcement touches on something built explicitly for Minecraft VR, more than just a port of the game into a virtual environment: Minecraft is coming to Oculus Rift, with some version-specific features that will make the game even better to play in VR!

What sort of features are on the table?

• Innate keyboard and mouse support
• VR control options for immersive comfortable turning with the Xbox One controller
• MSAA for crisp visuals, new render distance settings that will make use of powerful VR graphics cards, and optimized Windows 10 DX11 performance
• Even more granular customization of VR settings, so you can mix-n-match for personalized comfort

This is in tandem with the major VR-specific features Mojang already had working, if which there are many. One neat thing in the Oculus version is the "Virtual Livingroom," which allows players to step back from the fully-immersive experience and into a virtual armchair - a nice break if you're starting to get dizzy or strained, but want to keep mining and crafting.

In addition, Mojang has added all kinds of tweaks to player movement. As an example, there is a special turning mode which breaks up the smooth rotation of your camera into short, abrupt jumps. It looks strange in videos, but the improvement to players' comfort cannot be overstated, and is readily apparent while playing.

It’s been three years to the day that Google Reader shut down. And here’s a feature they could never build. Introducing email newsletters in your RSS reader.

You can now forward your email newsletters over to NewsBlur and then read your email newsletters right in your browser/phone/TV/tablet. A couple dozen users have been beta testing this feature for the last couple of months and everybody agrees, this feature is amazing.

Newsletters are formatted to fit all of your screens, so it looks just as good on the web as it does on your phone.

Here’s the best part. If you get a lot of newsletters, you can group them into folders and even train them to highlight the newsletters you want to read first.

Setting up newsletters on NewsBlur is easy. Just follow the personalized instructions on the web by going to Manage > Email Newsletters on either the web dashboard or the manage menu.

You might ask why not just subscribe your custom NewsBlur newsletter email address directly to the newsletter instead of forwarding copies of the newsletter. The answer is that if you want a single source of truth for where newsletters are going, you want that in your email client and not on NewsBlur. If you ever change news readers (and with new features like this, why would you want to) you’ll want to change only a single filter rule instead of dozens of newsletter emails.

And with this huge new feature, NewsBlur just became even better. NewsBlur has branched beyond RSS for a while now, fetching Twitter and YouTube stories even without RSS. With newsletters, NewsBlur becomes your single source.

If you have suggestions on what NewsBlur can help you read next, post an idea on the Get Satisfaction forums.

By any standard, the past year has been hard on Evernote. Phil Libin, who led the company to 100 million registered users and a $1 billion valuation, abruptly quit the CEO post last July, triggering an exodus of top executives who had led the company since 2007. Complaints about the increasingly bloated core product mounted, just as the bottom began to drop out of the market for consumer productivity software. Soon, some critics were calling Evernote "the first dead unicorn," using the Silicon Valley term for startups valued at $1 billion or more.

Into this mix came Chris O'Neill, who previously spent a decade at Google. He once served as the managing director of the company's business in Canada, and later ran the business side of...

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